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[Muz]

Basing it off the Pomodoro technique, where you work 25 mins, take a 5 min break, work another 25 mins, take a longer break, and so on for the whole day.

The issue here is the 5 min break tends to turn into a 40 min break once you're looking at forums or taking a nap or whatever. It's not enough time to do anything, not even take a game break. Most games don't work into this, because they're too addictive to be enjoyed in 5 minutes. This includes most casual and Facebook games.

So, what about having a fun game that lets you play for 5 mins, then forces you to wait for 25 minutes?

I'm thinking something like a RPG that has a 3-5 min combat segment before breaking into a 25 minute break when you win, or maybe a city builder where you can only give orders every 5 mins, and have to wait 25 mins for the next turn. It'll even encourage people to do something productive while they wait.

[Lynx]

Sounds akin to "sporadic gameplay".

I've played Skyrates, it was fun for a while but they kind of dropped the ball when they couldn't muster any further game development and they didn't have a good option for allowing players to develop their own endgame.

[C.A. Sinner]

I'm thinking something like a RPG that has a 3-5 min combat segment before breaking into a 25 minute break when you win, or maybe a city builder where you can only give orders every 5 mins, and have to wait 25 mins for the next turn. It'll even encourage people to do something productive while they wait.

sounds an awful lot like those browser mmos and facebook games where you build stuff and have to wait a day for it to complete.

i can only speak for myself here obv, but when a game does something like that, it's pretty  a guarantee that i won't play it. just let me play when i want please.

[Muz]

Yeah, sporadic gameplay.

To clarify...

There is this smart alarm app which you place on your mattress. It uses phone sensors to detect how soundly you're sleeping by your movements. It then rings when you're not in very deep sleep, to get you in your least groggy mood.

The problem with most games is they really try to get you immersed. If you break away, you end up feeling a little unhappy at being pulled away from the game. I'd like to have something where the game is exciting to play for 3 minutes, then slows down near the last two minutes. Plus maybe like a larger game in 15 minutes.

With Facebook/browser games, there's usually some major issues:

• The breaks are inconsistent. It may start off 2 minutes, then 5, then 4 hours, then 20 hours, then 3 days. You just can't build a routine around this. You can't just say "I'll do this thing once, go out for dinner with some friends, then 4 hours later come back and finish it.. maybe some games like Farmville allow that kind of flexibility, but a lot of the browser RTSes don't.
• They're really shitty games. Literally "press button every half hour to continue".

But these games are very popular (multi million players) because it's a good model. It works for people who want a quick break from work. Mainly all those people who pick up a game as a quick distraction and wanting the thrill of progression without putting in 4 hours a day into it.

The main challenge would be to try to squeeze gameplay into a 3-5 minute chunk without taking the typical Facebook cop-out of not actually giving you a game.

You probably want something that takes only half a minute loading time at best. And you can maybe limit it to things that don't require retries. Clicking games might be really good for this reason, unless you can get short bursts of fun action in that time.

So, maybe something like a RPG or Simcity/Tropico kind of game.

[baconman]

Music games can be like this, if you play one set at a time. Fighters? Okay, that's more the length of a lunch break, because you'll need to hit your stride first, and then mash out some wins.

[Noah!]

I honestly don't see this being too hard to do if you break the game down into bite-size objectives, each taking 3-5 minutes to get through. Almost anything action-y should be easy enough to break down this way. Puzzles too, probably. And the aforementioned rhythm games/fighters.

Yeah, it's not the most elegant solution, but it allows for a bit of flexibility. One idea I had (/ stole from Dariusburst) is to have the whole game world subdivided into these mini-campaigns. You progress through the world by clearing these campaigns, but the cool thing is that, if you're the first one to clear it, you clear it for everyone else too (and get the credit for doing so). While this wouldn't work on a global-scale, it could be super-cool if it allowed for group savegames so you and your friends could all progress through the game together, each doing their part to get the team to the end. Then, if you were really hardcore into meting out gameplay, I guess you could make it so that you couldn't unlock more than one in a row by yourself.

[Lynx]

If you want to explore sporadic gameplay, I think the real challenge is how to get players to buy into not playing the game 100% of the time without having it feel like an arbitrary, punishing timer.

If you design the game around taking turns, i.e. everyone's doing their turns for a day so people who log in frequently or earlier than others aren't overly rewarded, that's more easily understood...  But for pomodoro-style stretches where you want to be able to come back in half an hour, more or less, that doesn't work.  Among other things, you don't want players to wake up in the middle of the night just to enter a turn and beat out other people.  (competition can be a compulsion!)

I'd implement the basic gameplay as time.  You can accumulate time, then spend it to build things.  Over time, things you've built can generate events ("workers are protesting for better food in the cafeteria!") and these events can be resolved at your leisure when you get back into the game, maybe by playing through minigames.  In the meantime, you can watch your miniature empire basically run itself, like an aquarium.

If you look at Skyrates, one major feature that made the sporadic gameplay work for them was when they added a chat feature so people could talk to one another while watching their airplanes fly over endless blue seas, waiting for combats to appear.

[Noah!]

If you design the game around taking turns, i.e. everyone's doing their turns for a day so people who log in frequently or earlier than others aren't overly rewarded, that's more easily understood...  But for pomodoro-style stretches where you want to be able to come back in half an hour, more or less, that doesn't work.  Among other things, you don't want players to wake up in the middle of the night just to enter a turn and beat out other people.  (competition can be a compulsion!)

In my mind, I see my idea as more of a collaborative venture than a competitive one, so it wouldn't necessarily benefit someone to really wake up at 3 a.m. to be the "first" to clear the next little bit of the grid. However, the issue of tying gameplay meting to other people still remains, and while there are ways to probably mitigate the issue (branching paths, for example, as well as being able to replay levels that other people have cleared), this is probably gonna be the big hindrance to true pomodoro action. So yeah, your points are totally valid, and this ideas is probably not terribly applicable in this situation. Sorry.

Though honestly I'm just trying to find alternatives to the timer idea because it's not really something that personally motivates me. As a reward for working, I think I'd rather prefer a neatly-encapsulated five-minute burst of goodness, and when the thrill ride ends it ends satisfactorily, leaving behind no lingering longings (aside from maybe "let's do it again!" which could then be my motivation). It might not be as creative nor as enforcing as using the in-between time itself as a game element, but I think it's a bit more flexible from a design perspective.
Aside: In essence, I think of the perfect pomodoro game as like a box of chocolates. You work for twenty minutes, and then you get to pop a little burst of gameplay as your reward. Yeah, if you really wanted to, you could pop the whole box in one go like a pig, but I have a hard time pinning the blame on the game in this situation. You already portioned out the recommended serving size; now it's up to the player to respect it.

[Lynx]

Maybe this is a problem with two parts, and you should try to solve one part first...  that being, how do you make a really fun 5-minute game that's different every time you come back to it?  This is a relatively well understood problem, but then you tie it into the second part...

Which is, 'how do you make a game where it benefits from you LEAVING IT ALONE for 25 minutes and doesn't punish you for leaving it alone too long?'  Keep in mind that 'not punishing' includes the idea that someone who pushes buttons every hour on the hour, say, doesn't have a competitive or cooperative advantage over someone who can only push buttons once a day.

And finally, you put the two together and you have your pomodoro game!

As I see it, the second game is "meta".  It wraps around the first game.  You need to do the first game to accumulate resources that you can deploy in the second.  You need to prevent people from grinding the first game endlessly, to promote finesse and technique over brute force.  Spawning a hundred accounts just to combine their forces is a form of grinding, you also need to watch for and design your metagame around these kinds of abuses.

So, lemme give you an example:

Imagine a simple procedural-generated Roguelike game as your mini-game.  For your metagame, you might have a small village where your heroes live, surrounded by "dangerous lands".  Your villagers need food grown on farms or fish found in water, and can turn wood, stone, and ore harvested from cleared areas into buildings that can increase the power of your heroes.  Your heroes in turn sally forth into the dangerous lands to clear new land for your villagers.

Now, if you didn't set some kind of limit, your player would just clear out dungeon after dungeon (or ruins, or outdoor areas, etc.) and soon have a map full of resources waiting to be claimed.  What you might do is to arbitrarily limit the number of 'adventures' the player can have per day to the 'level' of the adventurer's guild that their village supports.  And the adventurer's guild might have requirements about how big the village must be in order to support a bigger guild.  Then the village's population might increase relatively slowly, and you need to balance workers vs scholars vs merchants and craftsmen to support your economy.

You might allow a level 1 guild to have 3 adventurers on hand.  Maybe they can all three be grouped up and sent on a dungeon run...  Or the player might take two for a dungeon and one for a separate encounter, increasing the level of risk but also doubling the amount of expansion they can do for the day.

You could also allow players to repeat a dungeon.  If they feel they did poorly on a dungeon, they could try it again in half an hour, when the adventurers have "recuperated" from their prior attempts.

I haven't accounted for 'how do players interact with one another'.  As I see it, under this scheme, having 100 player-accounts just gives you 100 times the number of villagers that need to be fed and maintained.  If you allow them to share adventurers, well, each adventurer can still only do so much a day, and weaker villages' adventurers won't be able to do as much as stronger villages' adventurers, due to worser equipment and training.

Instead, I'd make villages specialized in some way-- maybe the element of Fire is stronger in some villages, Water in others, or maybe villages can choose a specialty like Rogue, Mage, Cleric, Fighter, Paladin, etc. for their adventurers' guild.  Players would have the option of trading, but only on a one-for-one basis.  At the end of the day you shouldn't ever need more than 5 friends in your local group to have access to everything you might want.

What after that?  Well, maybe once villages get to the point of being actual cities, they might graduate into some kind of wargame that resembles a turn-based strategy game...  But that's a whole 'nother ball game.

Note, this isn't a game I plan to implement.  If you like the idea, feel free to run with it!

[Muz]

Which is, 'how do you make a game where it benefits from you LEAVING IT ALONE for 25 minutes and doesn't punish you for leaving it alone too long?'  Keep in mind that 'not punishing' includes the idea that someone who pushes buttons every hour on the hour, say, doesn't have a competitive or cooperative advantage over someone who can only push buttons once a day.

Well, I think it should be rewarded. Grinding is fun.. it rewards people for putting effort into something. The issue with most games is that there's no cap on the effort you can put into a game, and it becomes RL punishing to win.

But the rewards would probably scale down after a while. Like maybe you can do an adventure once a day. You can probably work on side quests 3 times a day. Maybe do 'in-town' quests or buying stuff an unlimited amount a day.

I'd still like people to be able to play the game when they're not active. Like you said, a chat room could work. Maybe an 'aquarium/throne room mode' where they can look around and enjoy what they've accomplished. It would probably be geared to displaying and showing off their accomplishments.

Facebook has an interesting approach to multi-accounts, because the game itself can't track who's a multi, but the gameplay relies on cooperation with people. It's more about rewarding depth. Like you might need help from a level 10 player, so having 100 level 1 accounts won't help anything. It becomes easier to recruit/encourage than to actually run different accounts yourself.

[Lynx]

Cooperation-grinding is still feasible though.  If you grind all those accounts up to level 10, and your total strength is (your strength + 50% of all vassals), then bang, you're suddenly the Lord of Sock Puppets.

You yourself brought up this interesting point about Advanced Civilization and how it punishes players who expand too quickly though.  That's the general attitude I'd take about people trying to spam accounts-- they have more resources, but also more problems.  If they really want to spend that much time micromanaging their empire of sock puppets...  Well, that's their lookout.

As for grinding itself, well, I don't have any perfect solutions that allow everyone to get what they want.  It's a matter of choice, where do you want to limit people and where do you want them spending most of their time?  For a pomodoro game, especially, you want to have a feedback loop that results in the player wanting to come back later, not feeling upset because you won't let them play again immediately.

So, for instance, maybe you get problems cropping up-- orcs attacking your trade routes, villagers offended a dryad and she cursed the forests, etc. Problems might not actually impact your empire's economy (since otherwise you'd be disadvantaged for however long it took you to get to it, and feeling required to jump on them right away) but they'd look bad on your empire overview. You solve the problems, you can watch your fledgling empire slip right back into its smooth functioning.  Maybe spend some time planning future upgrades, but there's nothing urgent.

Come back a half hour later, and you have another problem to solve, of course.